Berserk

Later, Natasha said, He's coming for us.

'So what can I do about it? He's a killer, he's got a gun. I have my dead wife and a child's corpse in a ruined car. It's finished.' Tom found no hope in that morning's dawn, and the potential only for pain.

Not for Steven. Daddy, all this was for Steven, wasn't it? How can it be finished when it's only just begun?

'I don't believe you,' Tom said. He was sitting in the driver's seat, trying to work out what to do. He could think of nothing.

Natasha retreated to a deep corner of his mind and began to sob. I'm only doing this for you, she said.

He wondered how a dead girl could cry. 'I don't believe that, either.'

The girl was silent, still sobbing, and she withdrew and left him alone.

Tom gasped at the sensation of being abandoned and leaned back in his seat. Was she lying? Could Steven really still be alive? He felt in his bones that he could, and if there was even the slightest chance that his son was not dead, he owed it to himself—and to Jo—to try to find him. There was little else left for him now, nothing to go home to, no future …

No future. His hopes and dreams of a gentle old age spent with his wife had been blasted away by that bastard's gun.

Grief birthed anger, and Tom realised that he had been angry since that first encounter on the Plain. It had kept him going, boosted adrenaline into his system and given his aging muscles precious fuel to drive him on. He had excavated a mass grave and crashed his way from a frontyard under fire. That was not real, not him at all, and yet he had mud under his fingernails and the dead wife to prove it all.

And the thing in the boot. He had that, too.

'Natasha?' he said.

Daddy?

He ignored that. Let her have her own dreams for now, whoever or whatever she was. 'Natasha, how do you know where Steven may be? You have to tell me what you know if you want me to trust you. Look at it with my eyes … I'm sitting here talking to fresh air, and a corpse I just dug up is communicating with me in my head. You have to understand my doubt. You have to accept my uncertainty.'

I already showed you something about me while you slept, she said. That was honest, wasn't it? It's bad to lie. Only naughty children lie. I'm not naughty. I'm a berserker, and my family were berserkers, and they kept us hungry so that we would do those things for them.

'Who?' But Tom already knew.

Them. The men. The soldiers.

'But why use you? Why not do it themselves?'

There's more to see, Daddy. I can show you if you like. But not yet, and not here. Mister Wolf is coming, I can feel him, he's getting closer. We have to go. You have to take me away from here. I can show you the way, but you're the only one who can look after me.

'We have to go to the police,' Tom said, staring into the hedge beside the car. 'Jo is dead. She was murdered. We have to tell the police. Have to. They'll catch him, they'll protect—'

Me? Natasha said, and her voice had changed. Still a little girl's voice, but older and wiser now. Harder. They'll protect me? One look and I'll be sent for tests, cut apart. And you, what will they do to you when they find me in your car? How will you explain me? And Mister Wolf is one of them anyway, they'll know him, they won't stop him, or maybe he'll kill them, too, and we have to go, because the Wolf is coming and I can't stop him and you won't stop him, not again. Nothing can stop him. He killed my family and he'll kill me in the end, if we don't go now.

'You're confusing me.'

I'm telling the truth, Daddy. I wouldn't lie to you. He's a bad man, and no one can stop him, not the police, not you, no one. Our only chance is to find the berserkers that got away before he does, and then they'll help us.

'Got away? Who got away? Your family were dead in that hole with you.'

'There were others who escaped before I was buried.'

Another mystery, Tom thought. 'But why would they help us after so long?'

Because I'm one of them. The statement was so obvious that Tom could imagine no possible lie behind it. She was one of them, and they would help her. And him? Her new daddy?

'You're confusing me, and—'

We have to go. He's coming!

'We can't just drive away, not with Jo like this, we have to take her—'

He's getting closer.

Tom shouted an incoherent scream of rage and hopelessness, and he felt Natasha in his head soothing and calming, touching those places that she somehow knew would work.

Shhh, shhh, I love you Daddy, shhh.

'Are you good?' he said, not sure how else to ask. He knew what he meant; he only hoped that Natasha understood as well.

We were good, she said. All of us. Just different. My daddy … my first daddy … told me that they stole our innocence and forced us to do what we did. He said to never let it change me.

'Do you want revenge?'

I just want my family back. She sobbed again, her voice coming from farther away as if she were trying to hide. I just want to be with people like me. Will you be my daddy? Will you?

Tom nodded once, and she seemed to hear that. He was glad, because it was not something he thought he could actually say. Not yet.

He had no choice but to abandon the car. It was smashed up and shot to pieces, and to drive it any farther would be to risk being stopped. It was almost eight A.M., and there would be people on the road by now. Tom was surprised that no one had yet passed them on this narrow lane. And besides, it had Jo's blood on the seats. He could smell it, and he could smell her, the subtle lavender perfume she favoured growing stale as her body cooled beneath it.

Somehow, for now, he was keeping at bay the madness that her death must bring.

For the first time since leaving the Plain he opened the boot. It squealed, twisted metal protesting at being forced, and as the lid popped up he knew that it would never close again.

Natasha lay against the back of the rear seats, the heavy chains still wrapped around her body. She looked no different from before. Her smell was one of dampness and age, muck and must, and Tom stepped back a pace or two while fresh air swilled the boot.

I'm cold, she said. I'm hungry. Will you hold me?

Tom did not want to move any closer, but the vulnerability in that child's voice pricked at his heart. He could remember Steven when he was a little boy, standing at their bedroom door and saying there was a goat in his bedroom. Each time Tom would take him back and show him that there was no goat, and each time Steven would end up in their bed, snuggled between them in their warmth, already back to sleep by the time Tom and Jo settled down again. It was his voice, and their love for him, and secretly they had both quite liked having their young son in with them. He would twist a little finger into their ears to wake them at six in the morning, but he had a giggle that would banish the early hour and welcome in the sunrise.

Tom moved closer and stared down at the body. It was the first time he had seen her in daylight. 'Is that really you?' he said.

It's me, Natasha said. Look what he did to me. Look what Mister Wolf turned me into.

She looked like a child carved out of wood, wrapped in old cloth, constrained in chains, buried and left to rot. Veins and ligaments stood out in stark relief against her stretched skin. He could see old yellowed bones. The chains were rusted the colour of dried blood. And there was movement, tiny earthy insects crawling here and there where clumps of soil were stuck to her body or the chains, while others burrowed in hollows that gradual decay had formed in her corpse. A golden centipede made its way across the boot's carpet, afraid of the light.

Tom reached in, grabbed the chains and dragged Natasha to him. He gathered her up, grunting, amazed that he had carried her so far last night, and lifted her against his chest. He looked down into her face, terrified that she would smile. He would drop her and run, because nothing like this could be alive, not alive and moving like when he